Warning: SPOILERS for Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning are ahead!
The Mission: Impossible film series is over; Tom Cruise confirmed as much just days before the eighth installment, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, was released onto the 2025 movies schedule. In terms of ranking these movies, I place The Final Reckoning somewhere in the middle, because while I didn’t find it nearly as exceptional as the likes of Rogue Nation and Fallout, it was still a fun watch. It’s definitely worth streaming with a Paramount+ subscription later this year if you’re not able to make time for it at the movie theater now.
However, The Final Reckoning gets one major ding from me in terms of how it failed to resolve a mystery from 2023’s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning. The final two Mission: Impossible movies are the most closely connected in this film series, which was to be expected given that The Final Reckoning was originally called Dead Reckoning Part 2. And yet, this last hurrah fails to tell audiences the full story of what happened between Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and Esai Morales’ Gabriel, and I’m not pleased about it.
Hayley Atwell’s Grace as Dead Reckoning was winding down, and she also chose to accept it.
I didn’t mind that Dead Reckoning didn’t delve into the specifics about what led to Gabriel killing Marie. There was enough already going on in that movie, and I figured The Final Reckoning would pull back the proverbial curtain on that event. Sure, the main reason people are checking out Mission: Impossible 8 is to see more of Tom Cruise’s wild stunts and witness Ethan Hunt defeating The Entity, but the hardcore fans were surely eager to learn the full story behind Ethan becoming an IMF agent.
But we never get that. Gabriel was still causing trouble in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, albeit on his own ever since The Entity abandoned him because he failed to retrieve the key to the malevolent A.I.’s source code. Gabriel even gets a fitting demise in the movie, because just when he thinks he’s going to escape Ethan and parachute to safety, he cracks his head on the plane rudder, dying instantly. Yet at no point are we ever clued in about why Gabriel felt the need to kill Marie to hurt Ethan.
learned what the Rabbit’s Foot from Mission: Impossible III was (though that did leave a huge loose thread in the process). I was overall entertained by the events that unfolded in the eighth and final Mission: Impossible movie, but I can’t help but feel misled that a mystery that was dangled in front of us two years ago was never followed up on.
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Owen Davian and Sean Harris’ Solomon Lane. I could also just still be bitter about Gabriel killing Ilsa Faust in Dead Reckoning, though I understand why Rebecca Ferguson’s perfectly fine with not being in the franchise anymore.
Regardless, I would have been more invested in Gabriel’s activities across the last two Mission: Impossible movies if I’d known more about his past. Informing audiences about what drove him to take one of Ethan Hunt’s loved ones away from him would have made his conflict with Tom Cruise’s character more interesting. I’m also curious about how specifically Gabriel became The Entity’s liaison beyond simply wanting to obtain power. I mean, sure, that’s enough to explain a lot of terrible actions that people commit, but why not go the extra mile with this baddie?
Alas, that ship has sailed in more ways than one. So although I’ll always be disappointed that Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning never bothered to put this mystery to bed, whenever the time comes for a rewatch, I’ll just focus on the movie’s positive elements, like the (mostly) perfect submarine sequence, Tom Cruise’s extreme wing-walking plane stunt, and even the non-stunt-filled scene that was Nick Offerman’s favorite.